Various types of controlled-environment facilities are present in today's society, and persons may be voluntary or involuntary residents of such controlled-environment facilities temporarily or permanently. Examples of such controlled-environment facilities include correctional facilities (e.g., municipal jails, county jails, state prisons, federal prisons, military stockades, juvenile facilities, detention camps, and home incarceration environments), healthcare facilities (e.g., hospitals, nursing homes, mental health facilities, and rehabilitation facilities, such as drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities), restricted living quarters (e.g., hotels, resorts, camps, dormitories, and barracks), and the like. Certain controlled-environment facilities may be thought of as a small community or city, perhaps walled or otherwise access restricted, wherein various activities occur within the community and between the community and those outside the community in the daily operation thereof. Such a community may include a number of individuals and enterprises directly associated therewith, including management, staff, and inmates, residents, patients, or guests (herein referred to as “residents”), and a number of individuals and enterprises indirectly associated therewith, including friends and family of residents, vendors, government agencies, providers of services to residents, and individuals with a connection to the facility or its residents.
Various services are commonly rendered to residents of controlled-environment facilities, such as provision of telephony and/or other communication services, provision of information access (e.g., Internet access), provision of consumer goods (e.g., commissary items), etc. Many of such services are provided at a fee. That is, the facility and/or provider of such service may charge a fee for the provision of such services to a resident.
Third parties are often relied upon for payment of any such fees charged. For instance, the residents of a controlled-environment facility may not have funds readily accessible to them, and therefore third parties may be relied upon to pay for services rendered to the residents. In some instances, the third-party payer may be a party to the service provided to a resident, such as when the third party pays for telephony charges incurred for a call from the resident to the third party. In other instances, the third-party payer may not be a party to the service rendered to the resident, such as when the resident purchases a commissary item within the controlled-environment facility using funds of the third-party payer.
As discussed further below, various types of payment accounts (or “billing arrangements”) may be established with a third-party payer for payment for services rendered to a resident of a controlled-environment facility. A given third-party payment account may be a pre-funded (or “prepaid”) account, or some other type of billing arrangement. In some instances, a type of payment account that is acceptable to the service provider may be determined at least in part on a determined risk score for the third-party payer and/or the resident of the controlled-environment facility. Such risk score may be determined based on various factors, such as described in co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/480,264 titled “SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR ACCOUNT ESTABLISHMENT AND TRANSACTION MANAGEMENT” filed Jun. 30, 2006, which is a continuation-in-part of co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/386,032 titled “SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT USING INTERRUPT MESSAGE” filed Mar. 21, 2006, which is a continuation-in-part of co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/360,248 titled “SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR ACCOUNT ESTABLISHMENT AND TRANSACTION MANAGEMENT USING INTERRUPT MESSAGING” filed Feb. 7, 2003, and/or as described in co-pending and commonly assigned U.S. patent applications: Ser. No. 10/360,442 filed Feb. 7, 2003 titled “SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR TRANSACTION AUTHORIZATION DETERMINATION;” Ser. No. 11/386,056 filed Mar. 21, 2006 titled “MANAGEMENT OF PROVISION OF SERVICES BASED AT LEAST IN PART ON INFORMATION ABOUT A PAYOR'S UTILITY,” the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference.
The generation of revenue and profit is the driving force behind most business models. To supplement the cash purchasing methods in today's credit-based society, most businesses depend on some form of credit or entitlement authorization mechanism allowing for customers to purchase products, services, or other such items without the immediate physical exchange of cash. Inherent in such business models is the reality that a percentage of parties who purchase on credit or entitlement authorizations may eventually not pay, thus diminishing the business' overall profitability.
In order to balance the risk of such losses against the benefits of maintaining credit entitlement systems, businesses go to great lengths in making credit worthiness or other transaction authorization/verification determinations (collectively referred to herein as “transaction authorization determinations”), such as requiring lengthy applications including a wealth of personal information, accessing databases storing information about the potential borrower, and the like. This process is typically relatively slow and often-times results in a poor transaction authorization determination. For example, in order to minimize losses associated with poor credit risks, a transaction authorization determination implemented according to many business models may error on the conservative side, thereby foregoing a transaction having a collectable debt situation associated therewith because of a lack of information or insufficient analysis of decision criteria.
One example of a business model that generally requires more immediate credit/authorization determinations is the telecommunication provider industry, and, more particularly, businesses that provide telecommunication services to controlled-environment facilities, such as prisons. Prisoners are generally given some form of access to telephones, but the calls must be paid for. Telephone calls made by prisoners are typically made collect, wherein the called party accepts charges for the call.
As with other credit/authorization systems, some of the collect calls may never be paid for by the called parties. In such circumstances, the telecommunication service provider fails to recover the costs of providing the call, which, in turn, causes a loss of profitability. Bad debt losses may sometimes reach into the tens of millions of dollars for each telecommunication service provider with the industry total well over $1 billion. To address the risk of loss on some of the attempted prison calls, telecommunication service providers sometimes obtain information on the called parties in order to establish a customer database for providing call verification/authorization. When a prisoner attempts to make a collect call, the call or transaction request goes through a validation process. The telecommunication service provider accesses its customer databases and may be able to determine (1) can this call be billed (i.e., is there a billing arrangement with the local exchange carrier ((LEC) or the called party), (2) if the destination number is already in the service provider's files, has the allotted credit limit been reached, and (3) has there been any information received from the LEC indicating that the called party has not been paying his/her telephone bills. Depending on the extensiveness of the service provider's internal resources, the service provider may not be able to determine all three of these validation criteria. If favorable information is retrieved for each of the available validation criteria, the call is completed.
Conversely, if the prisoner attempts to call a destination number that is not already in the customer database, or if negative information is retrieved from the validation process, the service provider typically blocks the call from being completed. While these blocked calls save the telecommunication provider from losses for unpaid calls, some of those blocked calls represent lost potential revenue and profit that the provider would have generated. Thus, the telecommunication provider often encounters conflicting desires of: 1) connecting as many calls as possible to maximize the provider's billings; and 2) guarding against connecting calls that will likely not be paid, in attempt to maximize the amount of collections obtained from the provider's billings.
Traditionally, one of at least three (3) different types of third-party payment accounts (or arrangements) is implemented for telephone calls made by prisoners: 1) LEC billing, 2) direct billing, and 3) prepaid accounts. Each of these types of third-party payment accounts is described briefly below.
In LEC billing, the prison's telecommunication service provider typically sends the collect call bill to the LEC that services the called number. Thus, the prison's telecommunication service provider relies upon the called party's LEC for billing the called party for the charges incurred by the called party for collect calls from a prisoner. LECs, such as, Southwestern Bell, Verizon, BellSouth, Ameritech, and the like generally maintain accurate billing, name, and address (BNA) information, and may be authorized to bill third-party-provided telecommunication services if billing arrangements exist. It should be noted that for purposes of this disclosure, LEC is intended to include not only local exchange carriers, but also competitive LECs (CLECs), inter-exchange carriers (IXCs), and the like. LECs typically bill on a thirty-day billing cycle (i.e., provide a post-pay system that bills each customer for the telephone activity that occurred over the preceding thirty days). As with every other credit transaction, some LEC customers may fail to pay their bills. When this happens, the LECs recover any costs for providing the prisoner's call directly from the prison telecommunication service provider. Thus, the prison telecommunication service provider carries all of the losses for the unpaid collect calls originating from the prison, which generally effects the provider's profit realization.
Moreover, because of the LECs' typical thirty-day billing cycle, the prison telecommunication provider may not become aware that the bill has become delinquent for a minimum of 120 days after the bill was originally sent to the LEC (LECs may not declare a particular bill uncollectable for 120 days or more in many circumstances). Thus, the service provider would not know to block further calls to that destination number for anywhere from four months to over a year. If calls continue to the delinquent destination number during that period, a substantial amount of revenue and profits would simply be lost.
Further, by its nature, the market segment of customers whom the prison telephony service provider bills includes individuals that have particularly high-risk credit. For instance, individuals in this market segment are very often transient, fraudulent, and/or otherwise untrustworthy. Certain steps may be taken by the prison's telephony service provider in attempt to evaluate the credit worthiness of the party to be billed (e.g., the party whom a prisoner is attempting to call collect). For instance, before connecting a requested collect call, the prison's telephony system may access a line information database (LIDB) that contains subscriber information for the called party, and the prison's telephony system may use information obtained from the LIDB to evaluate whether to connect the collect call to such called party.
Regardless of these measures, however, it is often difficult to ensure that the customer (e.g., called party of a collect call) will pay the bill. One reason for this difficulty is that oftentimes the calling party is in prison for only a limited period of time. Thus, the prison's telephony service provider has limited leverage over the billed party. That is, once the prisoner is released from prison, the prison's telephony service provider loses its ability to apply leverage to the called party by requiring that the called party pay its outstanding bill before allowing another call from the prisoner to such called party. Additionally, it is difficult to maintain visibility of the called party by the prison's telephony service provider so as to enforce such leverage (i.e., to require that the called party pay his/her outstanding bill before allowing the prisoner to connect to the called party again), as the called party can easily change his/her telephone service from one LEC to another.
In direct billing, the service provider bills the called party directly. That is, rather than using the called party's LEC for billing the called party for charges incurred for collect calls from a prisoner, the prison's telecommunication service provider may directly bill the called party for such charges. For example, in some instances, a called party's LEC may not have a billing arrangement with the prison telecommunication service provider, in which case the service provider may resort to billing the called party directly. Such direct billing provides the service provider with improved visibility of the called party. Such direct billing method alleviates the service provider's dependency on the LEC for billing, and provides the service provider better exposure to the called party and the called party's payment history for charges incurred for calls made by a prisoner to the called party. That is, the direct billing method may enable the service provider to better track whether a given called party has paid for previous charges incurred for calls made by a prisoner. Of course, such direct billing imposes certain burdens on the service provider, such as tasks associated with identifying the called party's billing address (e.g., by obtaining the BNA from the called party's LEC), generating a bill, sending the bill, initiating collections efforts if needed, etc.
As an example of a prepaid (or “pre-funded”) account payment method, a prepaid account may be established for a called party, wherein calls placed by a prisoner to such called party can be charged (e.g., by the called party) against the prepaid account. That is, as a call is conducted, the charges for the call are decremented from the called party's prepaid account. Once depleted, the called party may be prompted to add additional funds to the account to permit the call to continue and/or to permit future calls. As another example of a prepaid account payment method, a prepaid account may be established for a given prisoner (which may be funded by friends and/or family of the prisoner), and the prisoner may charge calls made to any parties against the prisoner's prepaid account. In some instances, the prisoner's prepaid account may also be used for purchasing commissary goods and/or for obtaining other goods/services that may be available to the prisoner at a fee. Such prepaid account payment methods are generally the payment method having the least risk to the service provider because it ensures that the funds for a call are available to the service provider.
As described further herein, in many instances an opportunity to provide service to a resident of a controlled-environment facility may be perishable. For instance, as mentioned above, in many instances an inmate may only be detained in a prison facility for a relatively short period of time before being released (e.g., upon a posting of bail, etc.). Thus, while determination and establishment of an acceptable or preferred type of third-party payment account may be desirable to minimize the risk of loss to a service provider, it is often desirable to pre-establish such third-party payment accounts efficiently (e.g., before the resident demands the service) so as to avoid missed opportunities for business/revenue by the service provider.